long post, sorry, under a cut for those who care
“Self-improvement is not always easy,” went the text in the handbook. “Psychological self-improvement can be quite painful. Everyone who joins should anticipate that the process of self-improvement will involve serious emotional challenges. Does this make sense?” Then the recruiter listed “side effects” the Leverage psychology techniques appeared to cause: twitching, physical shaking, severe depression, paranoia, dreams and nightmares, and sexual arousal.
this is obviously cult nonsense? like weapons-grade synanon declaring in advance you are going to get emotionally abused and blamed if you can't handle it shit. in fact this is bizarrely frank about it! usually people are not this up front about the fact they are going to treat you like shit.
But almost all Leveragers devoted hours to studying self-examination using techniques forged by its founder, a charismatic analytical philosopher named Geoff Anders. Geoff developed his own theory of psychology while earning his philosophy PhD at Rutgers; Leveragers sometimes combined his system with alternative systems popular in the Bay Area, including spiritual meditations and ideas from popular therapeutic schools. Few had any professional training in either the academic or therapeutic versions of psychology. Leveragers generally referred to their basket of techniques as “introspection tools,” and these formed the basis of their Psychology program.
"hey i have my own eclectic set of self-improvement tools, no formal training in any kind of clinical mental health practice, and you are expected to intensely study my own writings and the history of the organization you're joining" this is also bog-standard high-control group stuff. and i don't think you need, specifically, to be interested in the history of such groups for this to set off alarm bells--it's also the kind of shit that obviously transgresses major social and professional boundaries, and if your job is asking you to do this you should run screaming.
During James’s recruitment, he received a demo from a guest lecturer who specialized in bodywork, a form of alternative medicine. That demo, James says, was “completely shocking.” The lecturer “had me lay down and just put his hands very lightly on me. And I had a massive qualitative change in experience… I felt as if I had been asleep for a month, and just woken up fresh. And I had no caffeine tolerance anymore.”
if someone tries to convince you they have magic powers you should, as a rule, not believe them. if you subjectively experience evidence of their magic powers, you should consider that human psychology is quite suggestible. but then by this point you have already joined a group that advertises its cultlike aspects in big bold letters in its orientation material, so maybe you're not in a position to do that; and this is what i mean by a lack of antibodies.
look, i don't know how this person and the sort of broader group of people associated with leverage fits into the rationalist/EA/TPOT/tech-adjacent bay area milieu, but one of the big attractions i think for a lot of people to this space is the promise of hidden or forbidden knowledge. this is understandable--it's a common way people get drawn into everything from conspiracy theories to MLMs to cults to just mainstream knowledge presented in a contrarian way, the idea that through this route you will access things either other people don't know, or that other people can't know.
this is a big part of EY's pitch in the sequences, and it works! "the world is irrational, but you can rise above it." and he (and the broader rationalist discourse) mix together things which are true and useful, things which are arguable but interesting, things which reinvent or recast already common ideas in novel ways, and things which are really dubious, within this framework.
but frankly, i think most people ought to be really skeptical of this kind of presentation of information. it is very very easy for this to become a way to aggrandize both the person presenting it and the audience, to use it as a tool to make you feel special, and to cause you to intertwine your sense of specialness-through-knowledge with your own sense of identity and ego, thus making repudiation or criticism of that body of knowledge tantamount to damage to your core identity.
this is a great way to get people to form insular groups and police identity boundaries, and not a great way to do truth-seeking. it's bad for truth-seeking, because once you get a taste for the whole forbidden/secret knowledge thing, i think you can become susceptible to some really silly woo as long as it's presented as heterodox or unconventional. it doesn't even have to be "THEY don't want you to know this!" it can be "well, there are some mysteries mainstream understanding can't explain, don't you have an intellectual obligation to entertain the possibility there might be something here even if you don't know the mechanism?"
and then when somebody touches you and you have a subjectively weird experience instead of going "huh, the human mind is pretty suggestible, that's interesting" you go to "this person has magic caffeine-tolerance-eliminating powers and used them on me." i don't want to be too mean, and telling someone who had that experience this would not be a good way to relate to them, but from a third-party vantage speaking to someone else, i simply cannot refrain from observing: this is stupid. you have to be kind of stupid in important ways to fall for this. you might be smart in other areas, but in this one, you are lacking important intellectual tools. tools that many, many people without molecular biology degrees have. i think if you fall for this kind of thing you need to engage in a long period of self-reflection as to what in your intellectual life led you to consider the possibility that magic powers like this are real, and what kind of social environments you spend time in that this didn't immediately seem absurd.
James sometimes heard screams and hysterical crying through the walls, only to be assured that these were standard outcomes of the Psychology program.
I lived nearby in San Francisco, but my boyfriend at the time was traumatized by growing up in the Church of Scientology; he insisted that I stay away from Leverage. Yet despite his warning, I was curious. I’d had a surprising spiritual experience in 2016, which shifted me from an agnostic to a believer in God. By the time I heard about Leverage, I was fascinated by mysticism, meditation, and witchcraft.
honestly this boyfriend is the only person in this whole article who strikes me as sane. what do they put in the water in california??
Emily recalls that the group was alert for cult warning signs. She says that, as part of the effort to not become a cult, they watched and re-watched a classic YouTube video titled “How to Start a Cult.” They also watched the 2011 documentary Kūmāré, which is about an Indian-American filmmaker who decided to impersonate a wise guru hoping to demonstrate that cults are fake, but who thereby accidentally created a close-knit spiritually flavored group, whose members found it meaningful and helpful.
"our 'let's try not to start a cult' working group is raising some questions already answered by the name of our working group." like, at a certain point, if you have to ask the question "are we a cult?" maybe you need to radically rethink your approach to how your organization operates? this is not a problem most startups or think tanks or whatever have!
don't wanna like do a running commentary of the whole thing, but the strong impression i got was of a classic dynamic of people who might have wide intellectual interests but don't have strong intellectual principles, and who are very hungry for a sense of purpose and meaning, letting themselves be drawn in by a combination of the "we're-so-heterodox" branding and the "you're-so-special" recruitment pitch. the profile offered of the founder--a guy inspired in equal parts by his own gradiose sense he could fully understand all of human society himself and also by science fiction he read as a kid--seems of a piece with that.
and there's some stuff here that to me seems to feed into the failure modes of rationalism-as-actually-practiced, but i don't want to go too heavily into that because this is really an article about one organization that is at best rat-adjacent; there's a lot of the rat-adjacent penumbra which adopts rationalism or some of its aesthetics as a social identity marker, but i don't think it would be fair to treat that as a direct indictment of rationalism itself (though look, it doesn't say good things about that cluster of ideas that far more people seem to treat it as a social identity marker and an identity boundary to be aggressively defended than as a set of serious intellectual commitments).
leverage also seems to have filtered for people who have this kind of... look, i don't want to say you cannot be smart and a cynic. but everyone *i* have ever known personally who was intensely cynical and had a default orientation of "the world is fucked up, all authorities are illegitimate or at least stupid, nobody sees the truth of how bad things are except me and maybe a handful of others" was gullible as hell, drawn in by anything that had even a thin layer of countercultural or counter-intellectual paint slapped on it, and prone to support obvious grifters or be taken in by scams so long as they also spoke this language. i think the problem here isn't the critical stance as such, it's the sort of reflexively critical and cynical stance, which doesn't feel the need to justify itself with any kind of detail or nuance--the kind that says "the US government is obviously evil," but also can't talk in any kind of detail about the relative harms vs good, or is unable or unwilling to rhetorically distinguish like the activities of the CIA and DOD from, idk, NOAA or the USGS or the SSA. i think probably there's a long digression i could go into here about the cynical aesthetic being a useful way to dupe a certain kind of person who thinks they're very smart, but it's kind of off topic.
given that the author of this piece almost married curtis yarvin, my strong sense is that this whole cluster of people are, in some important ways, lacking important intellectual tools in their toolkit. not dumb--lots of raw knowledge and intellectual capacity--but clearly lacking basic practical filters like "is this a professional and socially appropriate way to treat people? is this kind of flattery and grandiose language something i should be wary of? am i being given a lot of impressive-sounding theories about the way the world really works that are awfully light on detail? am i, in short, being taken for a ride?" and lots of people lack these tools--cults and scammers and grifters are never short of marks--but as a group it seems to me the tech-adjacent space, the world of nerds who tend to spend a lot of time wandering realms of platonic abstraction and not a lot of time touching grass (a world i have great affection for and am a native inhabitant of) seems exceptionally vulnerable to this kind of thing.
